Jan 27
'SNL' Chooses 'Ambiguously Gay Duo: Safety Tips' Sketch to Celebrate Show's 5-Decade Run
Kilian Melloy READ TIME: 2 MIN.
Holy gay heroics!
"Saturday Night Live" is celebrating its half-century run with 50 sketches chosen to play across 50 days – and a queer superhero segment starring Stephen Colbert and Steve Carell made the cut!
The curated collection of skits will play during "the weeks leading up to February 16's three-hour 50th anniversary celebration on NBC," NBC News reported.
The animated gay sketch is the work of Robert Smigel, who has long been associated with the show, even being a part of the main cast for two seasons in the early 1990s, the writeup detailed.
"While Smigel's fingerprints are all over 'SNL' during his nonconsecutive 20-year run there," NBC News noted, "his inventive, boundary-pushing 'TV Funhouse' animated shorts are among his most enduring contributions."
"Ambiguously Gay Duo: Safety Tips" was one such animated segment, NBC recalled, detailing that it first aired on April 19, 1997.
"Drawn in the style of early-1980s cartoons like 'Super Friends' and 'G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero,' it finds masked heroes Ace and Gary showing some neighborhood kids how to... safely ride a bike, use the buddy system, and administer the Heimlich maneuver," NBC News quipped.
However, the report pointed out, the segment was not originally created for "SNL," which "explains why the duo was voiced by two people who were never SNL cast members: Steve Carell and Stephen Colbert." The writeup explained that the segment began as a contribution a year earlier for the short-lived "The Dana Carvey Show." Carvey, of course, became an "SNL" regular in his own right, along with Mike Meyers.
In a deep cut, NBC News recalled Smigel telling "the Television Academy that the sketches were also inspired by old Batman cartoons meshed with the Joel Schumacher era of the live-action films, and other over-the-top action movies of the '80s and '90s."
Said Smigel: "There's a whole other joke going on about the fine line between masculinity as a celebrated requirement of the male experience, and homoeroticism."
Kilian Melloy serves as EDGE Media Network's Associate Arts Editor and Staff Contributor. His professional memberships include the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association, the Boston Online Film Critics Association, The Gay and Lesbian Entertainment Critics Association, and the Boston Theater Critics Association's Elliot Norton Awards Committee.
